Emperor X – The Orlando Sentinel

There are a lot of dudes out there, these days, slinging their hat on the one-man (mostly) band bracket, playing up the slop sink, lost fidelity aesthetic like it’s a badge of homely honor as opposed to a first world reactionary privilege and some of them are good, sure…really goddamn good, in fact but enough times out of ten they’re just total fucking bummers and who in the hell has time for that?

He’s too busy having fun, imbuing his work with a profound sense of play too often ignored by artists on any shade of the pop culture or fidelity spectrum which is what makes his work so incredibly relevant and endearing to me. Even at his most somber, Emperor X echoes a grin, a joy that drives his melodies out from the singer/songwriter elegy straight to the place in the brain where earworms are fattened on whistling walks and inelegant shower sing-alongs.

And there are melodies aplenty on The Orlando Sentinel – Emperor X’s release of the moment – saddling electro-tropic rhythms, liberal beach clean guitar strings (“Fierce Resource Allocation”), boom box rally up rambles (“Daytrader Stadium”) and the weird world of anyday, unremarkable sociopolitical tenderness (“Swim Laws”). There’s also a whole lot of “Fuck Art, Let’s Dance!” thrown in because this is an Emperor X record and if Emperor X decides what his Floridian herald needs is in-the-red, in-the-club beats, hyperactive ambient chillout post wave dynamics and a little something about Kafka presented as its own Ring Cycle as both complement and anathema to the “standard” song structures that populate the rest of the record’s purpose then that’s exactly what Emperor X is going to do because he’s Emperor X, goddamnit and Emperor X does as Emperor X sees fit because the life he leads is a masterwork of his own delight and invention.

Did I mention that Emperor X used to be a high school chemistry teacher? Kinda makes total sense, huh?